Bushwhacker Belles: The Sisters, Wives, and Girlfriends of the Missouri Guerrillas

Chapter 1

The Political Climate in Missouri

Before we meet the bushwhacker belles, it will help to understand the political climate that led to their emergence.

Slavery was of course part of the landscape. But the women who helped guerrillas didn’t necessarily come from slaveholding families. Only about one-eighth of Missouri families held slaves at the outset of the Civil War. The proportion was somewhat greater along the Missouri River counties where guerrilla activity was the most prominent during the war and where most of the women arrested for supporting guerrillas lived. Even in these so-called Little Dixie counties, non-slaveholders formed the large majority of the white population. Only in Lafayette County, the largest slaveholding county in the state, did the proportion of slaveholding households approach even half of the county’s total households. Still, whether they owned slaves or not, most Missourians with Southern roots paid lip service to the institution of slavery.¹

But was this slave economy that mainly benefited wealthy landowners worth going to war over? The yeoman farmers who comprised most of the state’s rural population needed another reason for fighting. Southern leaders in Missouri provided that motivation by appealing to an emotion that was stronger and more immediate than support of an abstract principle or an institution that did not directly benefit the average citizen. Missourians must fight, so the argument went, to protect their homeland, their homes, and their families from rape and rapine at the hands of the Federal government. The invading Union Army threatened not just the institution of slavery but also that most sacred of institutions—the family—and posed an especial menace to women, the very embodiment of family.

The specter of the rape of white women by black men had long been used in Missouri and other slaveholding states to incite white men. Many heralded the prospect of freed male slaves and invading Federal soldiers as a sexual threat. This helped galvanize opposition among Southern-sympathizing men to the so-called Northern war of aggression that Black Republicans, as abolitionists were often called, had instigated against the South. A Northern newspaperman traveling with Iowa troops in Missouri early in the war observed, The Missourians believe very generally that we came here to steal their niggers, hang the men and ravish the women.²

Physical assault on Missouri women by either slaves or Union soldiers was actually quite rare during the Civil War. That said, Union soldiers invaded homes when no man was present. Troops spoke obscenely in front of women. They threatened families. These acts of what Fellman has called symbolic rape were cause for outrage. The sexual imagery they evoked helped solidify opposition to the Federal invasion of Missouri. So, too, did the pillaging, burning, and rape of the land early in the war by jayhawkers like Charles Doc Jennison and Jim Lane.³

In his inaugural address in January of 1861, several months before war erupted in Missouri, Governor Claiborne F. Jackson labeled the Northern states aggressors and advocated the thorough organization of a state militia to protect the lives and property of Missourians from a possible Federal invasion. He called on Missouri to consult her own interest and to stand by her sister slaveholding states. His use of the feminine pronoun in reference to Missouri was not accidental. Figuratively, the state was understood to be female, a motherland that men should protect, just as they should protect women themselves.⁴

The state’s individual citizens, however, were understood to be male. Only men could vote or otherwise participate in politics. The social role of women outside the home was limited. Men represented their households in political and most social functions, while women’s lives revolved almost exclusively around the home. Worshiped as goddesses of the hearth but denied any real power, women stood outside politics and war—the weaker sex who needed protection. Their role during war was merely to support their husbands, sons, brothers, and fathers; keep the home and family going; and then welcome back their heroes.⁵

One of the more visible roles women were allowed to play in the war effort was the making of flags and uniforms. Women became closely associated with these patriotic symbols. The flags and uniforms they presented to their men at the beginning of the war served not just to identify units and ranks but also to remind the men why they were fighting. Even Quantrill’s guerrillas supposedly had their black flag, lovingly made and presented to them by Anna Fickle, whose story is chronicled later in the book. Although the tale of the black flag might be apocryphal, it shows the mythic value attached to patriotic symbols. The guerrillas were fighting not just for themselves but for Anna Fickle and the women and motherland she represented.⁶

In fact, guerrilla warfare arose in Missouri precisely because many of the men who signed up to fight in Governor Jackson’s Missouri State Guard at the outset of the war found that their desire to protect their homes, their families, and their homeland outweighed any devotion they might have had to the overall Southern cause. The Missouri State Guard had been created specifically to protect Missouri, and many militiamen balked at following their commanding general, Sterling Price, into the Confederate Army in late 1861 and early 1862. When their initial term of enlistment expired, many simply went home to try to resume their former occupations.

Some of the officers, still nominal members of the disintegrating Missouri State Guard, went back into their home territories on recruiting expeditions, seeking once again to fill out their units. Many of these recruiting officers eventually joined the Confederate Army once they finished organizing their units. The Confederate Army itself later sent officers from Missouri back into their home state on recruiting missions. Leading mere bands as they sought to fill out their companies, the recruiting officers waged a war of plunder and sabotage against the occupying Federal Army. Many were in no rush to get back to the regular theater of war in the South. The proximity of their homes to their field of operations often drew their families and friends into the partisan warfare.⁷

Although the guerrilla leaders usually held commissions as Confederate recruiters, Federal authorities refused to recognize them and their men as regular Confederate soldiers. They were, therefore, not protected by the rules of war. Instead, they—and the civilians who helped them—were considered outlaws.

Confederate General Sterling Price.(Courtesy of the Library of Congress.)

As Fellman has pointed out, protecting womanhood was at the very heart of the unspoken guerrilla code, but Union men also placed women on an exalted shrine outside the realm of politics. They did not expect to have to deal with women during the war. In fact, Union authorities in Missouri did not have to deal with women very often during the early stages of the war. On the infrequent occasions in 1861 and 1862 when women were discovered helping guerrillas or otherwise acting as collateral participants in the war, they were usually not taken seriously. Either they were not arrested, or, if they were arrested, they were usually dismissed without charges.⁸

Of course, one of the reasons that Missouri women were seldom arrested early in the war for aiding guerrillas is that guerrilla warfare was not prevalent at first. It did not become widespread until the summer of 1862 and did not peak until two years later. Acts of sabotage like bridge burning that were committed in 1861 were considered serious crimes, and the perpetrators of such acts were treated as outlaws. Guerrillas were generally viewed more as a troublesome nuisance, though, than a real threat to the Union war effort in Missouri.

Another reason women were arrested infrequently early in the war was that Union authorities were slow to recognize the vital role civilians played in sustaining the partisan fighters. When they began recognizing the important part civilians played, they resisted the idea of targeting women and families as a way of undermining the guerrilla presence in Missouri. Protecting women was even written into the Union Army’s laws of war.

Neither side wanted to be seen as making war on women.⁹

A noticeable shift in Union policy toward the treatment of female associates of the guerrillas occurred around the spring of 1863. On May 3, Benjamin F. Parker, colonel of Confederate partisan rangers, wrote to General James G. Blunt, commanding the District of Kansas. He railed against Blunt’s policy of arresting and banishing Southern ladies of the district merely for vindicating the sacredness of their sex against the slanders and insults of the base and unmitigated scoundrels, calling themselves United States soldiers.¹⁰

Blunt dismissed Parker’s complaint as the ranting of a barbarian. He replied that he had instructed his officers commanding troops in the border counties of Missouri to destroy or expel from the district every Rebel sympathizer who gave aid to guerrillas. These instructions, the general stressed, will not exempt females from the rule. Experience has taught that the bite of the she adder is as poisonous and productive of mischief as the bite of any other venomous reptile.¹¹

Shortly afterward, Blunt’s District of Kansas was split into the District of the Border and the District of the Frontier. Brigadier General Thomas Ewing, Jr., was put in command of the District of the Border. It encompassed much of northern Kansas and part of western Missouri, with headquarters at Kansas City. Adopting an even more zealous campaign than Blunt to eradicate guerrillas, Ewing began rounding up female loved ones of the guerrillas to banish them from the district. Many of them, including the sisters of Bloody Bill Anderson, were imprisoned in Kansas City. When the structure collapsed on August 13, killing five young women, the guerrillas were understandably outraged. Ewing did nothing to soften their fury when he issued Order No. 10 on August 18, officially proclaiming the policy he had already instituted. It read:

Officers will arrest, and send to the district provost-marshal for punishment, all men (and all women not heads of households) who willfully aid and encourage guerrillas. . . They will discriminate as carefully as possible between those who were compelled, by threats or fears, to aid the rebels and those who aid them from disloyal motives. The wives and children of known guerrillas, and also women who are heads of families and are willfully engaged in aiding guerrillas, will be notified by such officers to remove out of this district and out of the State of Missouri forthwith.¹²

After guerrillas struck back by sacking Lawrence, Ewing issued Order No. 11, an even more severe policy. It required all citizens living in Jackson, Cass, and Bates counties and the northern part of Vernon County, except those within one mile of a Federal post, to either establish their loyalty and move to a military station—or leave.¹³

The policies that Blunt and Ewing adopted in the spring and summer of 1863 reflected the growing intolerance of Union authorities toward the female associates of guerrillas. Arrests of women accelerated. Only about forty women came into the custody of Union officials in St. Louis from the beginning of the war until the end of 1862, and not all of them were imprisoned. By comparison, at least one hundred seventy women, most from the state of Missouri, were jailed in St. Louis area prisons in 1864 alone. Many of them were arrested for helping bushwhackers. Indeed, the large majority of the women profiled in this book were arrested during 1864, the peak year of guerrilla activity in Missouri.¹⁴

The Union’s arrest and prosecution of women represented an explicit recognition that they could not be ignored and would have to be dealt with. No longer could they be dismissed as outside the realm of politics and war. To be prosecuted was to be taken seriously. Even being required to take an oath was significant, because it meant that a woman was being recognized as a citizen. White women had always been allowed to take oaths, but being required to do so was an unusual acknowledgement of their political personhood.¹⁵

Few scholars today would disagree with the idea that the Civil War helped empower women, at least temporarily. The female abettors of the Missouri guerrillas were no exception. The activities they engaged in forced men—both the Union soldiers who opposed them and the partisan fighters who relied on their help—to take them seriously.

We will take them seriously, too. Let’s meet the bushwhacker belles and hear their stories—their backgrounds, testimony about their supposed crimes, their own words, their punishments, and the rest of their stories.

Chapter 2

She Adder and Rebel Damsel

In 1863, halfway through the Civil War, Union troops in Missouri were growing frustrated with their inability to drive Confederate partisans out of the state. The Federals had begun to target the guerrillas’ civilian support system. And even women, who’d largely been left alone until now, were no longer off limits.

Clay County was a Confederate stronghold. Food, clothing, and comfort were in short supply. Lurena Lou McCoy was nineteen, with two kids at home and her husband fighting for the South. After he slipped home for a visit, Lou decided to help the cause. She made a gray uniform for a guerrilla.

Federal soldiers interrogated her for the whereabouts of her husband, Confederate soldier Moses McCoy—and about the uniform she was making. Her husband’s hurried visit and the humble cloth landed Lou in a mess of trouble. She was one of the bushwhacker belles.

In a 1912 article for Confederate Veteran Magazine, Lou, now sixty-eight years old, recalled her arrest in Clay County during the war. Besides making a suit of clothes for the Southern recruit, she had refused to tell Federal soldiers where her husband was. Her memory of events, forty-nine years after they happened, was sharp, but there was a bit more to the story, at least from the Union side, than what she told the magazine.¹

Sometime near the first of March in 1863, Confederate recruiting officer Joe Hart appeared in the Clay County area with an irregular band that included Moses McCoy. Lou identified her husband as a captain in Colonel Jo Shelby’s Confederate cavalry brigade, and she explained that the men were not only on a recruiting mission but had also returned home to see their families. Lou was left alone since early in the war to take care of two kids, and still only nineteen years old in 1863. She was no doubt glad to see her husband and his friends, but the visit ended up getting the young woman in serious difficulty.²

On or about March 15, Lou’s sister Lydia was visiting the McCoy home a couple miles east of Missouri City when, according to Lydia, Lou went into town and brought back a tailor named James Moffett because she wanted to make a suit of clothes—a gray uniform—for Joe Hart. When Lou returned with Moffett, Hart and another guerrilla named Louis Vandiver were at the McCoy home. Moffett took Hart’s measurements and left.

After the material for the suit was cut, Lou went to the Missouri City home of Elizabeth Wallis around the first of April and asked her to finish the coat.

It was wartime, and money was scarce. They bartered. In exchange for Mrs. Wallis’s work, Lou offered to give her meat or other food items. Mrs. Wallis agreed, and she completed the coat except for buttonholes and buttons. Meanwhile, Lou went to Nowlin’s store in Missouri City and bought trim for the coat; she presumably cut the buttonholes herself and sewed on the buttons and other trim after Mrs. Wallis returned the coat to her.³

A local Union militia captain, Darius Sessions, somehow learned of Lou’s involvement in making a suit of clothes for a Southern soldier. On May 15, he arrested Lou at her home and confiscated the coat. The coat, however, was little more than a pretext. The main charge against Lou was that she had helped Hart’s band of guerrillas.

Sessions offered to parole her on the spot if she would reveal her husband’s whereabouts, according to Lou’s story many years later. She refused. Sessions and his detachment started with her toward the US arsenal at Liberty Landing as their prisoner. As the Federals escorted her through the streets of Missouri City, Louis Vandiver’s sister witnessed the spectacle. She sent word of Lou’s arrest to her brother and other members of Hart’s band.⁴

At Liberty Landing, arsenal commander Captain Joseph Schmitz of the Twenty-fifth Missouri Volunteer Infantry began gathering evidence against Lou. What about the confiscated coat? Elizabeth Wallis said Lou had told her that she was having the coat made for her brother. Lydia Alder on the other hand, suggested the only coat she knew about was the one her sister Lou had made for Joe Hart. Lydia said she saw the suit of clothes at her sister’s house after it had been completed. She did not know who had cut it out or where, but she said she saw Hart leave the McCoy premises with it. When she was shown the coat that had been confiscated, she said it was not the same one that she had seen her sister give to Hart.

So, it’s quite possible that Lou McCoy had a hand in making two different coats around the same time. Then again, it’s just as likely that Lou claimed the coat was for her brother when it was really for Hart. Years later, in her recollection of the events surrounding her arrest, Lou made no mention of two different coats. If there was only one coat, however, Lydia must have been lying as well. If so, her motivation for doing so is not clear since she had already implicated her sister with the first part of her testimony.⁵

At any rate, Schmitz drew up a formal statement of charges against Lou. The first charge was that she had given aid and comfort to the enemy. The specification was that she had fed and harbored Joe Hart’s band during the month of March.

The second charge was disloyal conduct. The first specification was that she had spoken in favor of the rebellion and of persons engaged in the rebellion. She was reported to have said on or about March 15, I have fed Hart and will feed him again and…if I had no children, I would turn out in the brush myself and help Hart. The second specification was that, when she was arrested, she had in her possession certain wearing apparel fashioned after the manner of the colors of the Rebels now in arms against the U.S. of America.

Among the witnesses who signed the statement of charges against Lou was James Moffett, the tailor who had fitted Hart for his suit.⁶

On May 17, after completing his investigation and drawing up the charges against Lou, Schmitz put the prisoner on a steamboat headed for St. Joseph, headquarters of the District of North Missouri. Meanwhile, according to Lou’s later story, Moses McCoy was south of the Missouri River heading back to the Confederate Army. Then word of his wife’s arrest reached him. Outraged by the news, he called at the camp of noted Jackson County guerrilla leader William Quantrill and asked for some men to accompany him back into Clay County. Quantrill furnished the warriors.

McCoy and about fifteen other guerrillas re-crossed the river on the morning of May 19. They were bent on revenge. Although most of the men accompanying McCoy had been recruited by Hart, Hart himself had temporarily left the group to make a trip to the St. Joseph area. Ferdinand Scott led the partisans who came into Clay County on the 19th. Others members of the gang, besides McCoy, included Frank James, Fletch Taylor, and Louis Vandiver.

The guerrillas went to the McCoy neighborhood east of Missouri City and called for breakfast at the home of a local man. They announced that they were members of Quantrill’s band, and their boisterous conduct led the man to believe they were drunk. After they left, the man hurried to Missouri City to report their presence in the area to the Union soldiers stationed there. According to Lou, the man was a friend of the guerrillas who told his visitors he must report them in order not to get in trouble himself. They told him to go ahead because that was what they wanted.⁷

Upon hearing the man’s report of guerrillas in the area, Captain Sessions of the local militia and Lieutenant Louis Grafenstein of Schmitz’s Twenty-fifth Missouri Infantry started immediately out of town. They took three soldiers to investigate.

The bushwhackers lay in wait at the side of the road about a mile and a half east of town. When the soldiers approached, the band sprang up out of the brush. They opened fire, knocking Sessions and a soldier named Benjamin Rapp down with the first blasts. Grafenstein was hit soon afterwards.

The guerrillas closed in on the three injured men as the other two soldiers escaped. Rapp was robbed and left for dead, and Sessions was shot two or three more times through the head. Grafenstein, while trying to surrender, was shot twice through the head as a woman stood by begging for his life. Captain Schmitz’s official report described the savagery.

The guerrillas trailed the remaining two soldiers into Missouri City by a circuitous route. They found Rapp was still alive, having been picked up along the road, brought into town in a wagon, and treated in a hotel. Upon hearing the news, one of the guerrillas went to the wounded man’s bedside, pulled out his pistol, and fired three more rounds into the helpless soldier. Left for dead a second time, Rapp miraculously survived again.⁸

The guerrillas pillaged the town. Then they moved off to the north, Schmitz reported, and rendezvoused with Joe Hart. Hart told them he had come straight from St. Joseph, where he had managed a brief visit with Lou McCoy, then on parole in the city.

According to Lou’s later story, however, her husband and some of the guerrillas re-crossed the Missouri River after the Missouri City raid and went back to Quantrill’s camp. They reported that Sessions was dead and Lou McCoy was still a prisoner. The guerrilla leader captured a Union provost marshal and held him as a ransom for her freedom.⁹

Upon first reaching St. Joseph, Lou McCoy was taken before district commander Colonel Chester Harding, Jr. He read the charges against her, and she admitted she had fed and harbored Rebel soldiers.

Calling her a she adder and a rebel damsel, the St. Joseph Morning Herald said she told Harding that her friends were in the brush to protect themselves from insult, rapine, and murder and that she would continue to help them as long as she could. That is the kind of grit we like to see in God’s last best gift to man, said the Herald, but we prefer to see her exerting herself for honest men rather than thieves and murderers. Miss McCoy should ‘star it’ in the South awhile. Despite Lou’s sassy attitude, Harding told her she could be released upon taking an ironclad oath to the Union, but she refused unless the most objectionable parts of the oath were marked out. Harding declined her demand and retained her in custody.¹⁰

Lou was held at first at the residence of a Federal captain named Dunn, but the limits of her confinement were soon extended upon her word of honor to include the city of St. Joseph. After she had been in St. Joe a few days, Harding called her back into his office and again offered her a parole in exchange for her oath. She again refused. Finally, after she had been in St. Joseph almost a week, the colonel offered her what she called a mild, light oath, and she took it. Immediately after taking the oath, she was informed that she needn’t have done so, because Quantrill had already negotiated her freedom in exchange for his releasing the Union provost marshal he had captured.¹¹

The oath Lurena McCoy took, which she later claimed was a light oath. (From Union provost marshals’ records.)

Much of Lou’s story rings true. Parts of it seem romanticized, such as her absolute refusal to take a strict oath. The extent of Quantrill’s involvement in the Missouri City episode and its aftermath is also perhaps overstated. What we know